Increasingly, vehicles are being equipped with Internet-capable control units. These control units enable driver assistance systems to access information about an upcoming route, for example with the help of a navigation system in the vehicle; this information may include speed limits in areas ahead of the vehicle in the direction of travel, tight curves, and the like. However, this type of information is sourced from a database stored locally in the vehicle and must therefore be regarded as static.
In vehicles known from the prior art, current dynamic data are obtained by sending queries at regular intervals to a control center such as a server. The server then responds with the information relevant to the individual vehicle, such as current traffic information regarding traffic movement within a certain radius around the vehicle.
In such communication between a vehicle and a control center such as a server, communication can be initiated by the vehicle, as described above. In this process, however, it is difficult to determine what an optimal query interval might be. Thus there is a trade-off between long query intervals, that is to say, queries with long intervals of time between the individual queries, and short query intervals. Specifically, if queries are sent relatively rarely to the server, new dynamic information is also transmitted with a relatively long delay. If, in contrast, queries are sent at short intervals, query data must be transmitted relatively frequently, even if there is no new information. A great deal of bandwidth is thus required, and wireless resources are wasted.
Alternatively, the vehicle can establish a permanent connection to the server. Such a transmission of vehicle information is described in DE 10 2008 015 232 A1. In this case, an IP link is maintained throughout the entire travel time of the vehicle, and the vehicle transmits its current position to a server at relatively short intervals. Transmitting its position to the server enables the vehicle to subscribe to a warning service. The types of events for which a warning can be issued in this case include, for example, the presence of emergency vehicles, slippery roads, traffic signs, road construction zones, and the like.
Such a maintained connection with the control center or the server, also referred to as the backend server, can also be established via VPN (Virtual Private Network). This enables the vehicle navigation system to report its geographic position or its travel route continuously, or as described in DE 10 2008 015 232 A1, periodically.
However, this leads to problems with respect to the privacy of the vehicle user. The GPS data indicating the geographic position of the vehicle are then known in the backend server at all times. An additional problem involves complexity. Specifically, the backend server is no longer stateless, and must instead update the last location of each vehicle every second. This is because in the transmission of information, only one difference from the information transmitted in response to the previous query is transmitted. As a result, this type of method is relatively costly.
US 2010/0100307 A1 describes a traffic monitoring system in which traffic data are collected by mobile devices within a region. A server then transmits the collected information by means of a “message broker” to a respective mobile device, if the mobile device is in an area in which speed is being monitored.
DE 10 2013 106 669 A1 describes a method for standardizing navigation data. In this case, a processor uses a mobile device to send data to a standardization system. The processor can then process the standardized data and provide navigation instructions.